QAA Podcast - Paleolithic Secret Societies and How to Join One (Premium E332) Sample

Episode Date: April 18, 2026

Travis and Jack are joined by Devin O’Shea to examine why even powerful billionaires like Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein seek increasingly exclusive associations. Devin turns to the anthropological work The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity by Michael Hayden to show how and why societies develop groups that declare themselves keepers of esoteric knowledge. How is this related to why Universities can’t seem to prevent dangerous fraternity hazing rituals? If you don’t want to join Kappa Sigma to find out, you could listen to this episode instead. The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2770-the-veiled-prophet Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Check out our new podcast series network Cursed Media! Spectral Voyager Season 2 is releasing now! Binge the entirety of Truly Tradly Deeply by Annie Kelly and Megan Kelly as well as Science in Transition by Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows: cursedmedia.net Produced by Liv Agar & Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

If you're hearing this, well done. You've found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast Premium Episode 332, Paleolithic Secret Societies and how to join one. As always, we're your host, Travis View. Jack LaRoche and Devin O'Shea. It seems odd for someone like Jeffrey Epstein to be interested in starting his own secret society. But in February of 2016, J-E-E Vacation at gmail.com wrote this.

to an anonymous interlocutor. Peter Thiel loved a secret society idea. He has done a lot of work on the concept. All failed so far. The recipient of that email replied with a little smiley face with a nose. Smiley face emoji. Let's do it. This raises so many questions for me, including, like,

are there several Peter Thiel failed secret societies out there? You can't really be an intimidating secret society if you can't even get like people's schedules a match. Yeah. I wonder if that was the problem of like, well, we were trying to organize sort of a cult of Moloch, but like everybody is just so busy these days. Yeah. It would have been easier over the pandemic. Yeah. By the way, if you know anything about Peter Thiel's secret societies, my signal is Devon T.Oshay.40.

But this came at a very particular time. The big question for me is why would guys like Jeff and Peter want to start their own secret club? I don't know that 2016 was a year that Jeffrey felt both. powerful and secure, but Peter Thiel was making some very big moves. He was on his way to bet everything on Trump and pull off this giant coup in Silicon Valley that we now all live in the aftermath of. And Thiel became like the Trump guy in tech and everyone had to suck up to him or risk of the fury of the federal government.

And now we sort of just live in that world. So that might be why the secret society idea didn't have to happen. Yeah, yeah. It's like, well, no, no, the government uses like palenteer. to know everything about your life. So really, there's no point anymore. Yeah, we invented a real life boundary. We have a thing you can gaze into that makes you evil and seize your thoughts.

So we don't really need like a ritual, you know? One way or another, Epstein was drawn to the idea of secret societies and secret inner circles, an inside circle for those already in the hyper wealthy, well-connected inside. But why? As noted by the New York Times, his network already functioned kind of like an elite. club. The Epstein House slash office is, by careful design, exclusive and clubby. Part hangout,

part secret society. Life in Epstein's Manhattan House rather conforms to the scripted fantasies. Somewhere between Daddy Warbucks and Eyes Wide Shut. Which is not where you want to be between Daddy Warbucks and Eyes Wide Shut. That's a bad spot to be in. It's a very particular image. Yeah. Not good. No.

It gets to a thing that we're going to talk about, which is both the furious father and the psychotic father and then the like paternalistic like rich father dual face. Yeah, no, just just the combination of eyes wide shut and abandoned neglected orphans create some very dark imagery. They're really stepping on it there. And in fact, in the emails, we can see that there was a hunger for this exact kind of Kubrickian event.

An unknown friend asked Jeff. I'm trying to find high-end, eyes-wide shut parties. Do you know any? God damn it. Yeah, it's like door old people, like they DM their friend groups. Like, so what's the move tonight? What are we doing? We go in like, it's like, we drink in?

What are we doing? It's like, these people, they're like, golf. Okay, where's the elite masked orgy? Come on. Where is it? Where's the code word? Give me the secret door. Whatever it is.

Let me in. Hey, you know any of those orphans? Got any new ones? Terrible. And in fact, a 2010 iTunes receipt confirms that Jeff rented Kubrick's film about a cartel of masked elites conducting a ritualistic sex party where they do a lot of drugs and often murder slash sacrifice people to some unknown system of quasi-religious belief. But to me, it's just odd that people like Jeff have the desire for more exclusivity while living a life of what seems to be purely rarefied hyper-exclusive. social circles. To me, that seems like a little bit of a neurotic behavior, some sort of like I can never be satisfied kind of thing. And today's episode is all about a book that might help us explain a little bit about how old and ancient that impulse is. The power of ritual in prehistory.

Listeners may be familiar with this one, which was published by Cambridge Press in 2013. It's a big black anthropology book with a scary brown mask on the front. the power of ritual and prehistory, secret societies, and origins of social complexity by Brian Hayden. Hayden is an anthropologist at the University of British Columbia, and his work is centered on tribal secret societies, not modern ones. We're talking about stuff that started to happen in like the middle to upper Paleolithic era, which makes that somewhere between 312,000 years ago, which if you're anything like me that's an unfathomable amount of time. Like 500 years in the past feels like basically a different planet. And I'm not exactly sold on all of the arguments in this book, which is peer-reviewed and I am not an anthropologist. So take that into account also. But as we go, we're going to think about this slightly

skeptically together. To start, the power of ritual argues that tribal secret societies developed at a very particular point in the archaeological economic record. There's no evidence to suggest that groups like this were around in the transient hunter-gatherer formations, and Hayden argues that they only arise when a more complex form of settlement is starting to take root, which coincides with the moment when civilization starts producing a surplus. Huge mistake to be producing a surplus, you know? It's all about that surplus, man. It's like all anybody ever thinks about it anymore, you know? Just like sad. You know, we had to start writing with a surplus. Like, come on. You got to keep track of the surplus.

You need tabulation. That's so annoying. Doing formal agriculture, huge mistake, producing a surplus. Nothing but bad stuff has come from that. This transition is sort of the big anthropology question, though. Have you guys read The Dawn of Everything? The David Graber, David Weingrow. No, I've had it to me before, but I have not read that one.

I have a copy of it that I really need to dig into, but I haven't yet. It's a big book, right? It's like a fat one. So it's like a commitment, it feels like. But that book does a really great job of complicating some of the previously simplified ideas around why and how we went from nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled tribal chiefdoms, right? And then on to more and more complex forms of society. The dawn of everything argues that there is a lot of messy and anarchic stuff going on,

uneven development, trying things one way, giving up. become a little more interested in trying to, for example, regularly harvest honey from beehives or to develop interesting new ways of working together to build a complex system of nets, which help consistently fish a certain part of a stream for most of the year. And then the other part of the year, we figured out how to harvest a kind of grain plant that had to be cultivated for generations and now is like kind of reliable. There's also a lot of talk of acorns. We all know So acorns are just like really essential. But they actually seriously were.

Acorn harvests are like very big because they're predictable and it's a lot of calories that just fall out of the trees and you could store them and use them for all kinds of stuff. I think all that's very interesting. So we used to move around a lot and now we've stopped doing that and we build stuff, including storehouses where we can stash excess grain, honey, fish, acorns. As Hayden argues, as soon as this collectively produced plenty is evident, we see evidence. that a group of the tribe's powerful people get together, and they declare themselves in possession of very scary magic powers. Like you do.

As you do, those acorns go right to your head. Oh, yeah. It's crazy. You have enough of them? Have you ever seen squirrels? You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast. For access to the full episode,

as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, why is that such a? good deal. Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes, plus all of our miniseries. That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie, 10 episodes of Perverts with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of the Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad,

plus 20 episodes of Trickledown with me, Travis View. It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting. Travis, for once, I agree with you. And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion. It's a fact. You're so right, Jake. We love and appreciate all of our listeners.

Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think, out of gratitude, maybe? That's not true. The part about be crying. Not me being grateful. I'm very grateful.